This Bond, however, seems to have no such upper-class pretensions. Pierce Brosnan’s 007 had a family motto, while Roger Moore’s drank espresso and had an exclusive bootmaker. The intro manages the nice trick of highlighting that this is not only a new Bond movie but that this is a new Bond, one we haven’t seen before. Which he does, satisfyingly, in a flashback-within-the-flashback-but again, it’s a stripped down fight scene, two guys going mano a mano in a dingy restroom. But we didn’t come here for a master class in building cinematic tension we want to see Bond kick some ass.
The whole sequence - in which a crooked MI6 station chief arrives at his Prague office to find Bond waiting for him - is shot in hi-contrast black and white, with Hitchcockian camera angles and stark, shallow-focus closeups. Instead, we watch, in flashback, the story of how Bond first earned his “00” status - his license to kill.īut what it lacks in flash, it makes up for in film-school artsiness. Gone are the massive action set-pieces, the mind-boggling stunts, the beautiful women, the cars, the gadgets.
After the conceptual bloat of the late Pierce Brosnan films, the coming of Daniel Craig was supposed to be a return to basics: a post-bubble austerity program for a franchise struggling with its longstanding reliance on subprime special effects and gimmicks.Īnd the intro sequence here is extremely basic.
